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Lauren Duval

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Lauren Duval

Jennifer Davis

Lauren Duval is a historian of early North America and the Atlantic World specializing in women’s and gender history and the era of the American Revolution. She is currently completing a book manuscript, tentatively titled, The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Creation of the American Republic, which analyzes the domestic experience of war during the American Revolution. She argues that British occupation strained emotional ties and altered household dynamics by disordering the racial and gender power relations embedded within revolutionary households; this profound disruption, she concludes, led Americans to envision a new role for the private home as a national symbol of American independence and the sacrifices of war. Professor Duval has published an article from this project, “Mastering Charleston: Property and Patriarchy in British-Occupied Charleston, 1780-82,” in the William and Mary Quarterly, which received the journal’s 2018 Richard L. Morton Award and the Coordinating Council for Women in History’s Nupur Chaudhuri First Article Prize. She also has forthcoming chapters in two edited collections: “War and Society’ in The Cambridge History of the American Revolution and “‘a shocking thing to tell of’: Female Civilians, Violence, and Rape under British Military Rule,” in Waging War: Women’s Battles in the American Revolution. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the New York Public Library, the David Library of the American Revolution, and the Massachusetts Historical Society. Professor Duval earned her PhD from American University in Washington, DC.

 

Professor Duval teaches courses on colonial North America and the Atlantic World, the American Revolution, and early American women’s and gender history.